


a dangerous idea that almost makes sense

by nuricurry



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Post-Canon, Semi-unrequited love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 12:03:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19991881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuricurry/pseuds/nuricurry
Summary: It isn’t fair to Sing. It isn’t fair to himself. It isn’t even fair to Ash, really, and he’s been dead for ten years. It isn’t fair to anyone, and yet he allows it to continue.





	a dangerous idea that almost makes sense

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gravy_tape](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gravy_tape/gifts).



There are nights where he wakes up hearing Ash’s laughter.

Sometimes it’s remnants from a dream, one that is mostly a memory, but also a bit of fantasy. Dreams of them at Coney Island where Ash spins them so fast in the teacups that he makes Eiji vomit up hot dogs and neon green relish into some bushes. Dreams where they walk through Central Park with some respectable distance between them, save for their pinkie fingers which they link together, hot and tight and intimate. Dreams that overlap seamlessly with reality until the moment they don’t, and that’s when he wakes up and Ash is laughing at him. Probably because he keeps holding onto those dreams. Probably because he’s crying and staring at the ceiling again, and he hasn’t slept properly in ten years. 

Routines help. He wakes up (which means he simply falls out of bed after not sleeping for a few hours), he makes breakfast, he walks Buddy. He has coffee and watches the news and he pretends to listen, he pretends to be aware of the days that slip by, the years that crawl past him, the world continuing to spin on and on while he’s still trapped at age nineteen when he wrote his last will and testament to someone who is no longer alive. He works for a few hours, he develops film in the darkroom he made in his apartment, and then he cries in his bathroom while choking down handfuls of antidepressants and supplements because he doesn’t live anymore, he just survives. After that, he pulls his shit together in time for dinner, which he makes and then never eats before finally, he goes to bed. 

Routines help. It gives him something to do in between the hours of no sleep and emotional malfunction. 

Sing has a routine, but it’s much healthier than his. It has an actual purpose, where he gets things accomplished, and he moves forward in his life, he presses onward and lives and grows and changes into someone new. Eiji has been lingering in stasis despite his claims to the opposite. He’s grown up, he says, excusing his isolation as maturity, he’s doing fine, he’s happy, he’s figuring it all out. They’re all lies he tells to his friends, his coworkers, Sing, himself, and he doubts any of those people believe them.

It isn’t fair. 

It isn’t fair to Sing. It isn’t fair to himself. It isn’t even fair to Ash, really, and he’s been dead for ten years. It isn’t fair to anyone, and yet he allows it to continue.

He’s human. He feels loneliness, and grief, and desire, and just because Ash died that doesn’t mean that his heart died with him. If anything, it feels as if he experiences things twice as strong now, it’s like a flip was switched and he can’t turn it off. He’s stuck in a cycle of those same five stages, from denial to anger to eventual acceptance, going through the motions over and over again because regardless of how often he thinks about it, it still never feels real. 

Sing is far too generous when it comes to handling that. 

His hands are so much bigger than Eiji’s now when a decade ago it felt like they could be easily swallowed up by his. He has big hands and long fingers, and they burn hot as they brush across his back, his shoulders, tracing delicately against the line of his neck. Eiji has dreamed about it-- once, twice, four thousand times-- of asking Sing to wrap those hands around his neck and choke him out, to cut off his air until everything fades and goes black and he can just forget, and maybe, possibly, cease to exist. It’s a dark thought, one he never voices, because for as cruel as he is already, he can’t bear to be even crueler. Sing doesn’t deserve that, he doesn’t deserve any of Eiji’s damage, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to take hold of it anyway. 

“ _He’s dead_ ,” Sing tells him when he’s drunk off of too much shaoiju and after hearing about Eiji avoiding the public library again, in spite of the fact that they likely have a book he needs, a manual for this camera he’s been trying to restore, because it’s old and so is he, and it reminds him of being nineteen and carefree. “ _He’s dead, Eiji. I wish that he would let you go already_.” 

Funny how Sing talks as if Ash can keep a hold on him. If anyone is holding on it’s Eiji, who has his memories of Ash seized in an iron grip, along with the fantasies of the lives they could have lived together, the histories and legacies that could have been made, ones that could never erase the ones that came before, but might soften them a little, make them fuzzy along the edges. All he wanted was to make it so that Ash didn’t always have to be on his guard for everything. As it turned out, he accomplished that goal and in the end, it cost Ash his life. 

Can’t come back from that.

They’re both painfully sober the first time it happens. Eiji wishes he could blame it on alcohol, that there was some force beyond himself to be held responsible for the choices he made. But the truth is simply that he’s self-centered and desperate and he was horny and Sing happened to be there and willing. Saying it like that makes it sound as if anyone would have suited Eiji, if they happened to be present at the right time, but that isn’t true. He wishes it was, because then that was another thing he could blame on the human condition and not on his own lacking self-control, but he knew that because it was Sing, because he trusted him so deeply, because he had let Sing pick him up off the floor time and time again, that he let him get closer, he let him cross that line. There was no substance, no drug, that made him do that. The only thing he was high on was his own loneliness, and Sing was always willing to scratch that itch. Even at great cost to himself.

He isn’t a stranger to sharing a bed with someone. He is a stranger to sharing it with someone like Sing, someone who is big and broad and who never seems to fit in anywhere in these tiny New York apartments. With Ash, it was different. Ash was slight, a combination of fine bone structure and malnutrition, long-limbed but thin, like the cattails that grow along the edges of the rivers in Cape Cod. _If you turn to the side you’d disappear,_ Shorter used to tease Ash, and when he thinks back on what he remembers of Ash, he thinks that’s true. Sing isn’t like that. Not anymore. Sing is bigger than Eiji, bigger than Ash ever was, and when he’s pressed down into the mattress he looks so cramped, trying to fit on Eiji’s single person bed while having the shape of a person and a half.

There’s a voice in the back of his mind that screams in protest when Sing stays. It’s too much to let him linger in the bed longer than what is polite or necessary. 

(He hates that he has to make the conscious effort to be polite to the person he’s having sex with, but he does.)

He’s terrible and Sing doesn’t deserve him at his worst. He doesn’t deserve his best either, because since he lost Ash, his ‘best’ isn’t much better. If he was a thoughtful man, he’d stop. If he was a selfless man, he’d tell Sing that he should find someone who could love him as much as he loves Eiji. If he was a decent man, even a little bit, he’d apologize for all the ways he’s pulled and tugged and ripped at Sing’s heart until it was left in shreds in his hands. 

Instead, he just kisses him when he’s drunk and fucks him when he’s lonely, and then never lets him stay the night in his bed. 

There has to be a breaking point, Eiji thinks to himself sometimes, there has to be a moment where it’s all going to be too much, it’s going to go too far, and then Sing will wake up and realize his mistake and then leave him forever. Or maybe finally, he’ll stop being a coward, he’ll stop using his friend as a shot of morphine he can take and fuck whenever he needs it, and not care about how it feels afterward. 

He waits for it. He waits for his life to crumble and fall apart again, for there to be a moment where it all goes wrong and he has to start over from scratch.

That release never comes. He just has to keep living the same life, suffering the same consequences, and keep dragging Sing down with him.


End file.
